The Republican corporate tax reform plan would give a $70 billion tax cut for foreign investors annually for several years, according to an analysis released in the Tax Notes journal on Monday.

Tax Policy Center think tank fellow Steve Rosenthal wrote that in the plan advanced by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans "a surprisingly large portion of this relief would end up in the pockets of foreign investors."

He estimated the savings for non-Americans would be $70 billion, because although the GOP tax plan would lower corporate taxes by some $200 billion a year, foreigners own about 35 percent of corporations through stocks or ownership of U.S. subsidiaries of multinational corporations and thus would receive the proportional part of the total savings.

The $70 billion in annual savings for foreigners would be about three times higher than the $23 billion that all middle-income households would receive under the plan, according to estimates.

The White House claims the tax cut would spur corporations to increase investment in their businesses, especially by bringing it from overseas back into the U.S., which would, in the long term, then lead to higher wages for American workers.

This conclusion, however, has been disputed by Democratic economists.

Rosenthal wrote that the argument over the long term should be put aside for a moment. Instead, the focus should be on the fact that in the years immediately following the corporate tax cut, before companies even had the chance to make the switch to building their American operations, the benefits of the tax cut would accrue to shareholders, including ones who are not Americans.